Chapter 4
LEE
“Goose Run, though?” Tyler asked doubtfully as we turned off the highway at the gas station and headed for the town itself.
“Wait until you see the place,” I assured him. “And okay, yeah, the owner’s a little quirky, but the money’s better than at South Hill. Plus it comes with good health insurance.”
The health insurance was the real win for Tyler since he and his wife were currently trying for a baby.
It was still a hell of a gamble, though, because who knew if the bakery would even be in business six months from now?
But when Bobby Merritt had asked me if there was anyone I wanted to bring on board to help run his new bakery, I’d thought of Tyler straight up.
He knew his way around a kitchen, he was a good guy, and we worked well together.
Plus he also thought Henry at South Hill Bakery was an asshole.
I’d already been to Goose Run once to scope the bakery out and set up the day after we got back from vacation, and I couldn’t help glance over at Tyler as I drove, waiting to see if his first impressions of the town were about the same as mine.
From his increasingly dubious looks, they were. The furrow in his brow got deeper with every rusted-out car body we passed on the side of the road.
So the drive into Goose Run wasn’t exactly picturesque, but the town itself looked nice enough, especially as we got closer to Main Street.
All the stores must have been built about a century ago, with their brick facades and awnings.
We passed a pretty wooden church painted white, and there were signs that the little town was actually flourishing—there were shrubs and flowers in planter boxes along the sidewalk, what looked like a new children’s playground being installed in a little park by the church, and a couple of guys in a truck doing roadwork by the elementary school.
Also there was activity in Main Street—most of it was open for business.
There were a few empty stores, but they all had SOLD stickers plastered on their doors and windows.
Unlike so many small towns in the area, Goose Run looked like it might be heading in the right direction instead of the wrong one.
“Okay,” Tyler said, nodding as I pulled into the small parking lot behind the bakery. “Okay, I don’t hate what I’ve seen so far.”
“It gets better,” I said with a grin.
We walked around the front, and Tyler blinked at the sign hanging from the awning and then at me. “Gobble de Goose? Seriously?”
I unlocked the door and let us in.
The front of the store was bright and airy.
We weren’t a sit-down cafe, but there were a couple of tables and chairs near the long windows that looked out onto Main Street so the customers had somewhere to wait for their drinks, and the entire back wall was taken up by the counter and the empty display cases.
The front of the counter was covered in tiny bright tiles, and the top was polished wood.
It looked modern and sleek. The first time I’d visited, there’d been an empty space for the point-of-sale terminal, but there was a screen there now, and it looked hooked up and ready to go.
The espresso machine was new too. It was a gleaming chrome monster of a thing with more buttons than NASA’s launch control center, and it was magnificent.
Bobby had assured me he’d hired the best barista he knew to run it.
“Come on through,” I said to Tyler, and we stepped around the back of the counter and into the kitchen.
“Holy shit,” Tyler said. “Holy shit.”
That had been my reaction too, because I’d never seen a work area so new and shiny.
The area wasn’t super big, but the light bounced off what felt like a million stainless steel surfaces—a pair of brand-new prep tables gleamed, as did the large industrial sinks over in one corner, the two stand mixers, and the mid-sized floor mixer that was big enough to run a large dough.
There was a giant walk-in fridge, rows and rows of sheet pans stacked and gleaming in their rolling racks, and a pile of bread pans waiting to be lined and prepped for baking.
There was an industrial-sized gas range that had never been used.
Both the rack oven and the deck oven were pristine and flawless, without so much as a fingerprint on their surfaces.
The whole place looked like an equipment showroom. It was almost blinding.
“Is this stuff all… new?” Tyler asked reverently. “Like, new new?”
“Yep,” I said.
“Okay, so is this Bobby guy insane or just really rich? Because nobody buys new stuff,” Tyler said.
I’d asked myself the same thing. “Both, I think? I tried to tell him that everyone uses refurbished equipment, but he insisted on a completely new setup.”
I’d only known the guy for a hot minute, but I’d already figured out that once Bobby got an idea it was best to just go along for the ride.
And hey, Bobby obviously had money and a vision, and if he wanted to put both those things into a bakery and was willing to let me have control, who was I to argue?
And he was willing to let me take control, was the thing.
One of the first things he’d said to me when he’d offered me the job was, “I don’t know a darn thing about running a bakery, but I don’t need to. I just need to know if you can run it.”
“Sure,” I’d said, with a confidence that was eighty percent optimism and twenty percent newly unemployed desperation. “Give me some decent staff and equipment, and I’ll make sure it’s a success.”
And just like that, I was the new manager of Gobble de Goose. A week later I still couldn’t quite believe it, and I was now seeing that disbelief reflected in Tyler’s eyes.
“This is fucking amazing,” he said and gave a low whistle. “Jesus, Lee.” He headed for the walk-in and opened the door. “Holy shit.”
Yeah, the walk-in was stocked already, and the flour that Bobby had ordered on my recommendation? None of the generic shit that we’d used back in South Hill. This was premium cake flour, the stuff that Henry had refused to buy because “nobody can tell the difference.”
Bullshit.
“I can’t fucking believe we’re doin’ this!” Tyler said, closing the walk-in door. “This is gonna be great!”
We planted our asses on the pristine prep tables and threw a bunch of ideas back and forth, our voices echoing in the empty building.
Most of them came easily enough. Back at South Hill, we’d always talked about what we’d change if we ran the place, and now we actually had the chance to put some of those ideas into place.
We hashed out a plan for opening week, figuring out what we needed to make and how much.
I was keeping the menu simple for now. Bobby said he expected we’d get about two hundred people on our first day, so we decided to work off that estimate.
If we sold out early, too bad, but since Bobby was adamant that everything be made fresh daily, it was better than making too much and having to put it in the trash at the end of the day.
Might as well just throw money straight in the dumpster.
Bobby had also spread the word that we were giving out a bunch of free samples.
“Fucking mini cupcakes, though?” Tyler bitched. “I fucking hate frosting those things.”
“Well, too bad,” I said with a shit-eating grin. “Because I say customers will love them, and I’m the boss!”
He flipped me the bird.
“We’ll do cookies too,” I said. The great thing about cookies was that you could prep and freeze them in advance, and people tended to buy a bunch of them at once.
Tyler nodded and raised his eyebrows. “We’re gonna do pastries, right? You gonna make some biko?”
I hadn’t even thought about it, but I snorted. “You think Goose Run is ready for biko?”
“Fuck that,” Tyler said. “That’s Henry talking, not you. Besides, you said you’d teach me.”
“Maybe not in our first week,” I said. “But okay, yeah, we’re gonna do it.”
The idea of making traditional Filipino pastries and desserts, the same dishes that had gotten me interested in becoming a baker to begin with, had pretty much been stamped out of me at South Hill Bakery, but this was a new bakery, and like I’d just reminded Tyler, I was the boss.
I felt a thrum of excitement in my gut as I thought of all the recipes I could create here in Goose Run.
The same recipes I’d learned from my lola.
She’d be over the moon when I told her I was making them in my own bakery.
“And those purple cookies too,” Tyler said.
“Ube cookies.”
“Fuck yeah,” he said with a grin. “Those are the bomb.”
“Maybe,” I said, but I was already mentally calculating costs. Ube was expensive and could be hard to source, so we’d need to check if there was actually any demand before I chased down a supplier.
Holy shit, look at me, acting like a manager already and we haven’t even opened the doors yet.
I grinned at Tyler and hopped down off the table. “Let’s get to work.”
I was wiped by the time I got home to Emporia that evening.
We were as set up as we could be for opening day, and we’d worked hard all day to get there.
Tyler had liberated a bunch of sourdough starter from South Hill when he’d left there and I’d set it up and fed it, and now we had a batch of sourdough loaves prepped and ready in the walk-in to bake first thing, as well as a heap of different flavored cookies and pastry dough.
There were also two hundred mini cupcakes baked and ready to be frosted in the morning before we opened.
If I never saw another fucking cake again in my life, I’d die a happy man.
“Lee!” my sister Sam yelled from the doorway. “Look what I made you!”